Energy Policy 50 (2012) 7280

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Energy Policy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/enpol

A brief history and the possible future of urban energy systems

Paul Rutter a, James Keirstead b,n
a
b

Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history:
Received 18 October 2011
Accepted 28 March 2012
Available online 21 April 2012

Modern cities depend on energy systems to deliver a range of services such as heating, cooling, lighting,
mobility, communications, and so on. This article examines how these urban energy systems came to
be, tracing the major transitions from the earliest settlements through to todays fossil-fuelled cities.
The underlying theme is increasing efciency under constraints with each transition marked by
increasing energy efciency in service provision, increasing per capita energy use, increasing complexity in the energy systems structure, with innovations driven by a strategic view of the overall system,
and accompanied by wider changes in technology and society. In developed countries, the future of
urban energy systems is likely to continue many of these trends, with increased efciency being driven
by the constraints of climate change and rising fuel prices. Both supply and demand side technologies
are discussed as potential solutions to these issues, with different impacts on the urban environment
and its citizens. However in developing countries, rising urban populations and access to basic energy
services will drive the next transition.
& 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Urban energy systems
History
Transitions

1. Introduction
Urban energy systems represent the the combined processes
of acquiring and using energy to meet the energy service
demands of an urban population (after Jaccard, 2005: 6). Historically these needs were relatively simple, comprised largely of
space heating and cooking requirements. However the activities
of a modern city are supported by a diverse range of energy
services: heating and cooling for buildings, lighting of both indoor
and outdoor spaces, electric power for appliances, mobility
services, communications, and so on. Recent research has demonstrated that cities account for two-thirds of global primary energy
demand, a gure expected to rise to 73% by 2030, and in turn,
these demands account for over 70% of global CO2 emissions (IEA,
2008). Cities are therefore integral parts of the modern energy
system and at the forefront of efforts to shift from fossil fuels to a
more sustainable footing.
The story of how modern cities came to be powered largely by
fossil fuels is instructive for understanding future transitions. Briey,
the earliest urban energy systems developed from the need to
supply settlements with food and fuel. Prior to settled living,
itinerant hunter-gatherers collected food and fuel as they travelled
over large areas, moving as necessary to nd these materials. Even
small settlements of a few inhabitants would have had little impact
on the capacity of the surrounding environment. However larger

Corresponding author. Tel.: 44 207 594 6010; fax: 44 20 7594 5934.

E-mail address: j.keirstead@imperial.ac.uk (J. Keirstead).

0301-4215/$ - see front matter & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2012.03.072

populations would have eventually exhausted the ability of the

immediate environment to supply sufcient food and fuel. For
example, Johnson et al. (2004) and Samuels and Betancourt (1982)
estimate that the low density woodland in parts of the Southwest
USA would have been completely depleted in a few generations by
the pre-Hispanic villagers. The fact that many successful early towns
and cities were located on navigable rivers or coasts suggests that
overcoming such constraints was vital to the development of urban
energy systems. By collecting food and fuel from a large hinterland
and transporting it affordably to the city, local production constraints could be overcome and this system, based primarily on
manual and animal power, was at the heart of all urban energy
systems from 3000 BC to the advent of the railways and canals in
18th century Europe. However as Industrial Age cities grew into
their millions, the manual distribution of sufcient energy supplies
to individual urban households and establishments became difcult,
opening the way for early experiments with locally-produced and
distributed gas and electricity, often using imported feedstocks. By
the 20th century, these local energy solutions were unable to service
the scale of energy consumption and urban development, and cities
gradually became linked together in national gas and electricity
grids to overcome these inefciencies.
These shifts, their drivers and their consequences, are summarised in Table 1. It suggests that past energy transitions have
been slow, taking decades or even centuries (Fouquet, 2010), and
that in the urban environment, they seem to follow a pattern of
increasing efciency under constraints. In other words, as the
consumption patterns of one energy system begin to create
substantial environmental, social or nancial burdens, market

P. Rutter, J. Keirstead / Energy Policy 50 (2012) 7280

73

Table 1
Signicant urban energy system transitions in the UK. Data from Raleigh (2000) and Gibbons (2010).
Transition

Approx. date

Approx. global
population

Driver

Technology

Consequence

Raw to cooked food

20,000

Food supply

Fire

Population increase

Nomadic to settled lifestyle

Settled to Urban

1.22 million
years ago
10,000 BC
3000 BC

10 million
50 million

Horticulture
Agriculture, wheel and sail

Population increase
City states and trade

Biomass to coal
Early urban networks

1650 AD
1850 AD

500 million
1.2 billion

Food security
Food security, trade and
defence
Transport cost of wood fuel
Effective street lighting

National grids

1950 AD

3 billion

Integrated energy services?

 9 billion?

Chimneys and steam

Incandescent light bulb;
gas cooker; railways
Efciencies of scale and natural Electricity and gas grids,
gas discoveries
automobiles
Highly efcient use, integrated
System efciency, resource
energy systems, secure low
availability, climate
emission supplies
constraints

and government pressure has motivated a switch to more

efcient technologies and new alternatives. In this article, we
examine these transitions by providing a short history of urban
energy systems to date. While other researchers have considered
this issue from a national perspective (Smil, 1994; Fouquet and
Pearson, 1998), we adopt an urban viewpoint in order to assess
the interactions between highly-concentrated local energy
demands and often diffuse energy supplies. Although the focus
is largely upon Western Europe, and London in particular, a range
of examples from different countries and energy sectors will be
used. Finally, we discuss the key themes driving these historic
transitions and evaluate their relevance to the future ambitions
for low-carbon energy-efcient cities.

2. The transition from hunter gatherer to settler

Urbanisation is a relatively recent phenomenon that did not
occur until 40,000 years or so had elapsed since our immediate
ancestors, Homo sapiens, migrated out of the African continent
and into Asia. As the climate warmed, the ice receded and the
human population increased. A hunter-gatherer group requires a
large range to supply it with food, with each individual needing
several square kilometres of land depending upon the availability
of game. Food supply may have been supplemented by the
development of cultivation amongst foraging hunter-gatherers
and herding amongst hunting cultivators (Tudge, 1998; Fuller,
2006). According to Keeley (1997), as the available huntergatherer range diminished due to the increasing population,
frequent skirmishing occurred between family groups and tribes
resulting in signicant mortality amongst adult males.
Coincidently perhaps, archaeologists date the rst permanent
settlements to this period. The transition from hunter-gatherer to
urbanite was likely to have been a gradual process, perhaps
beginning with summer and winter camps. It has also been
suggested that hunter-gatherers and settlers coexisted for a time,
although as Keeley also points out it is unlikely that relations
between the two were peaceful. Settlements appeared at different
times in the ve separate cradles of civilisation: the Fertile
Crescent, Egypt, the Yellow River basin, Meso-America and Peru.
Settled communities were able to devote time to domesticating
herd animals and to tend gardens containing favoured crops.
Settled communities also had children more frequently since they
were not constantly on the move (Diamond, 1998). The advantages of living in permanent settlements soon outweighed the old
hunter-gatherer way of life and the transition from nomad to
settler spread.

Rapid urban industrialisation

Better energy services.
Suburbs and commuting.
Low energy prices, reduced
dependence on coal
?

The rst formal energy systems likely co-evolved over this

period with changes in diet and agricultural practice. Possibly as
early as two million years ago, our ancestors advanced from
simply using re to keep warm, to cooking food (Wrangham et al.,
1999). This enabled them to increase their diet to include roots
and vegetables that were otherwise unpalatable or even toxic and
tenderising meat that would have been at best indigestible and at
worst poisonous. Fire also gave our ancestors the ability to
convert dried biomass at will into the means of keeping warm,
providing light, clearing scrubland to improve pasture for the
grazing animals they hunted, hardening wooden spears and
eventually converting clay into a hard material that would hold
liquids. This required a basic energy system to be put in place,
consisting of fuel gathering and storage together with simple
hearth technology to ensure that the heat from burning fuel could
be used effectively. Although recent research has reduced the
estimated time between early human use of natural re and their
ability to make re at will by producing sparks from int
(Alperson-Al, 2008), it is likely that considerable efforts were
taken to ensure that a re once lit, or collected from a natural
source such as a lightning strike, did not go out.

3. Early urbanisation
About 10,000 years ago life in early settlements, such as
Catalhoyuk in Anatolia and Abu Hureya in Syria, was not very
different from that of the hunter-gatherers. There was little
cooperation between family groups; each hunted and gathered
independently and tended their gardens for the few fruit and nuts
that they had learned to grow by observing the plants that
appeared in their old campsites. The population grew rapidly
since women could have children more frequently, even though
infant mortality probably increased due to infectious diseases
that would have spread more easily through settled communities.
Successful settlements require sustainable sources of water,
food and fuel for cooking and warmth. Management of the
amount of land allocated to food and fuel production with a
growing population was challenging, exacerbated in many cases
by the impact of forest clearance on water catchment and
drainage. Gradually however, the weight of numbers would have
had an impact on the surrounding environment. Wood and
combustible biomass would have been increasingly difcult to
nd close to the settlement. Timber for building huts would also
have become scarce and would have needed to be transported
over increasing distances. Archaeologists and historians list many
examples of once powerful settlements and even cities that fell

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P. Rutter, J. Keirstead / Energy Policy 50 (2012) 7280

into ruin because of the denuded lands inability to sustain the

population (e.g., Diamond, 2005).
Around 5000 years ago (3000 BC) large towns and cities such
as Ur, Uruk and Lagash appeared in Mesopotamia, the strip of land
between the rivers Indus and Euphrates in modern Iraq. These
drew upon the surrounding villages for food and fuel, which were
either traded for manufactured goods made in the cities or paid as
tribute. Importantly, most of these cities were located on navigable rivers that provided a low cost method of bringing bulky fuel
wood from the surrounding countryside. More than 4000 years
later, in 13th century London, this critical part of the energy
system remained unchanged as fuelwood was gathered from
estates surrounding the Thames, both upstream and downstream,
loaded into barges and brought into London to be sold on wharves
that still bear the names of their old trade. Rome depended upon a
similar system some thousand years earlier and it is reasonable to
suppose that a city such as Ur, which Gates (2003) estimates to
have had a population of 12,000 people some 4000 years ago,
employed the same energy supply logistics. Various estimates
exist for the amount of wood required for heating and cooking per
person per year. At the time of Ur a reasonable estimate might be
0.75 m3 compared to 1.5 m3 in 13th century London (Galloway
et al., 1996) and 1 to 1.5 m3 in 4th century Rome (Williams,
2002). It is estimated that wood use in communities which still
depend upon biomass for domestic heating and cooking falls
between 0.5 and 2 m3 per person per year depending upon factors
such as climate. A village eld plan proposed for Ur by Postgate
(1994) suggests that the raised dykes along the river Euphrates
would have been used to grow sustainable fuelwood possibly
through coppicing (there is evidence for this which dates back to
4000 BC in Britain (Rackham, 2010)), whilst the easily irrigated
land below the dykes would have been devoted to crops.
Harvested wood and possibly other biomass, for example, reeds
or straw would have been loaded into boats and transported by
river to be unloaded at the wharves in Ur. A simple calculation
suggests that managed woodland extending 28 km along a strip
1/2 km wide on both sides of the river in both directions would
have been sufcient to supply the 8000 people of Ur. For 13th
century London, estimates by Galloway et al. (1996) show that
there was more than enough sustainable woodland in the home
counties to supply the population of 40,000.
Whilst combustible biomass provided heat, humans and animals were the predominant sources of mechanical power. The
prehistoric earthworks and stone monuments and the great
Mediterranean, Asian, African, North and South American cities
of the ancient world were all constructed using human or animal
muscle power. Innovative machines designed to assist muscle
power, such as the shaduf for lifting water and the rotary quern,
began to appear in 1600 BC. The Romans used human and animal
treadmills extensively and similar machines were still operating
as recently as the 19th century in Londons docklands (Smil,
1994). Land transport depended upon draft animals or humans.
The great trade empires of the Anazazi in the Four Corners region
of the USA used human runners since even pack animals were
unknown. The Inca empire stretching more than 3500 km down
the west coast of South America was served by a network of roads
designed for humans and llama used solely as pack animals
(Parry, 2005).
Although the scale of energy consumption and associated
technologies improved, urban energy systems consisted largely
of biomass either burned in a hearth or fed to animals as food up
until the 13th century. However to complement biomass
resources, cities and their economies were also turning to other
renewable energy sources such as wind and water. Sails had been
known since 4000 BC (Egypt) and were used extensively on the
Nile. The use of sails to capture the power of the wind accelerated

trade round the Mediterranean basin and also facilitated invasion

and war. Water power was harnessed in this area around 500 BC
and was rapidly brought into use for grinding cereals eliminating
many thousands of painful repetitive human hours of toil. Water
power also powered a variety of machines used, for example, in
blacksmithing, tanning, fulling, and wood turning. The rst wind
turbines were probably invented around AD 900 in the Middle
East but it was not until the 14th century that windmills began to
be widely used in Europe. Although water wheels and eventually
windmills were capable of providing about 25 times more power
than a horse or 50 times more than a man, they provided less than
10% of the total power capacity available from humans and
animal muscles until about 1800 when steam began to dominate
inanimate sources of power (Smil, 1994; Wrigley, 2010).
Whilst many aspects of 13th century life in London would
have seemed extraordinary to a visitor from 2000 BC Ur, the
energy system would have been familiar. For about 3500 years
very little had changed in the urban energy system. Life in these
cities moved slowly and depended upon what resources could be
grown and harvested over a limited number of years, and what
could be carried on a persons back, by horse and cart or by boat
from local hinterlands. Improvements in technology and the
increased use of renewables meant that the energy consumed
per capita doubled from 15 GJ per capita per year in 1500 BC
Egypt (Smil, 2010) to about 30 GJ per capita per year in 17th
century (Malanima, 2006) based on food for human beings, fodder
for animals and rewood. However this was to change radically as
Europe emerged from the horrors of the Plague during the 14th
and 15th centuries.

4. Biomass to coal
The next major transition was from local resources harvested
instantaneously or within a few years to the use of vast reserves
of fossil fuels, representing hundreds of years of equivalent
energy in a compact form. Coal was the rst fossil fuel to enter
the urban energy system in signicant quantity. By 1450 London
was a rapidly growing cosmopolitan city drawing its wealth from
Englands wool trade. Small amounts of coal had been in use in
London since 1100 and perhaps earlier. Known as Sea-coles it
was used to provide the high temperatures needed in forging iron,
lime manufacture and evaporating sea water to prepare salt. The
name referred not only to the fact that it was imported by sea
from the Tyne, but also because it was often found washed up on
the beaches of Northumberland. Indeed fossil fuels were reasonably well-known and used where they could be easily gathered or
seeped above ground. The Chinese are credited with the rst use
of natural gas which was piped from natural outlets using
hollowed out bamboo for use in the production of salt. Even
though the amount of coal burned in the late 13th century
London was relatively small, the smell still incurred the wrath
of Edward I who banned its use, threatening to conscate the
forges where it was used. The use of coal in London persisted
however, causing a second monarch, Elizabeth I to complain
nearly 300 years later.
Between 1520 and 1550 Londons population grew from
55,000 to 120,000. This rate of growth put such a strain on the
previously sustainable fuel wood supply that it began to fail and
the price of wood at the London wharves increased sharply. The
Domesday Book estimated that about 15% of Britain was covered
in forest in the 11th century, but by the end of 16th century this
had diminished to about 6% (Allen, 2010). This was largely due to
woodland clearance around large towns and cities to produce
agricultural land for the growing population. The issue was
particularly acute in the case of London where the increase in

P. Rutter, J. Keirstead / Energy Policy 50 (2012) 7280

distance required to carry wood overland from the ring of woodland that was now 20 to 40 miles away resulted in a doubling of
the price of wood by 1550 and a trebling to 12 g of silver per GJ
100 years later (Allen, 2010).
The price of coal however, remained low at between two to
four grams of silver for the same heating value. This discrepancy
was almost entirely due to the cost of transport. The weight of
wood that could be cut by a woodsman in one year was similar to
the amount of coal that could be dug by a coal miner (Rackham,
2010). The difference in caloric value coupled to the fact that
coal was only transported a short distance from the mines on the
Tyne to ships that took it to London meant that, by the time both
fuels reached the wharves in London, the cost of fuel wood was
much higher than that of coal per GJ.
Whilst the cost differential made coal an attractive option
there was considerable resistance to its use. It took time for
builders to develop the chimneys and grates that enabled coal to
be burned without lling rooms with smoke. Most of this
experimental work was done in London before the Great Fire of
1666 but much of the knowledge gained must have been put to
good use during the subsequent rebuilding and by 1700, over half
of Britains coal consumption was for domestic heating (Allen,
2010). The commercial use of coal also increased as bakers and
brewers developed technology to prevent their products being
tainted by coal smoke. Fears of impaired quality caused glass
manufacturers to continue to burn wood in their furnaces until its
use was banned by Parliament in 1615. This caused Sir Robert
Mansell to move his glass manufacturing plant to Newcastle and
perfect a new covered crucible (Godfrey, 1975). Requiring about
the output of approximately one-seventh of English woodlands,
the iron masters came under considerable pressure to limit the
amount of wood they consumed for charcoal from a statute of
1580 which prohibited ironworks using charcoal made within
22 miles of outer London (Rackham, 2010) but it took a further
century for iron manufacture to turn to coal when Abraham
Derby developed a coke smelting process and another 50 years or
so of improvements before coke iron production started to replace
charcoal.
The move away from relatively short rotation biomass fuels
(e.g., a two-year rotation willow for kindling, eight to ten-year
rotation coppiced poles, together with wood residues from the
construction industry) to coal took even longer in continental
Europe. Whilst there had been relatively little government intervention in controlling fuel prices in London, the situation in Berlin
was different. When that citys population began to grow rapidly
at the end of the 17th century, wood prices increased and supplies
became scarce. State edicts enacted between 1691 and 1693 to
lower wood prices were ineffective and a central rewood
administration was established in 1694 to regulate the private
wood trade (Sieferle, 2001). In 1702 in Konigsburg, rewood was
rationed according to the rank of the household. Wood conserving stoves were known as early as 1325 but in 1763 an ofcial
contest took place in Prussia to design a domestic stove that
consumed minimum quantities of wood. Iron production had
enjoyed the use of dedicated wood supplies in parts of Germany
but this privilege was removed in 1783 with disastrous results on
their ability to export cheap iron. By the end of the 18th century
the state authority that maintained the cheap price of fuel wood
in Berlin allowed the price to rise and also began to sell coal at a
loss to promote its use. In Silesia the use of coal was also
increasing rapidly in spite of the widespread propaganda against
the use of coal during the rst half of the 18th century.
Authoritative articles and pamphlets had been published in
Germany and France describing the health hazards of burning
coal. One claimed that one-third of all the inhabitants of London
died of wasting disease and lung ailments caused through the

75

corrosive effects of smoke from coal res. Another obstacle to the

widespread use of coal was the inland location of the coal pits and
commercial centres and the lack of good navigable waterways.
This meant that the price of coal was relatively high and as late as
1886 in Hamburg, Ruhr coal could not compete with imported
coal from England.
Meanwhile in Britain by 1800 the consumption of coal had
risen to 15 million tonnes per annum providing both domestic
and industrial heat (Allen, 2010). However the English pits had a
problem and, by the end of the 17th century, many were suffering
from ooding. Draining the mines was expensive and tunnelling
drainage channels was dangerous. Many solutions were offered
but most proved unworkable. In the late 1600s Denis Papin
demonstrated a device to the Royal Society consisting of a piston
inside a brass cylinder that was made to move by heating water in
one end of the cylinder. Thomas Savery invented a device that
used a vacuum created by condensing steam for draining mines.
He called it the miners friend and demonstrated it before the
Royal Society in 1699. However it had a number of practical
disadvantages and was not commercially successful. Barbara
Freese (2006) notes that one observer complained in 1708, every
year more mines are left unwrought or drowned for want of such
noble engines or methods that are talked of or pretended to. The
stage was set for Thomas Newcomen, who built a much larger
piston with a separate steam boiler and was able to convince the
mine owners that steam power was a practical proposition. His
rst re engine was installed in a mine in 1712 and was much
cheaper to run than the 50 horses it replaced even though it was
extraordinarily inefcient. Newcomens engines proved popular
and although one was built to pump water from the Seine to
supply Paris, in practice it was uneconomic to operate them
anywhere except coal mines where coal was cheap and unmarketable small coal was abundant. The increase in coal production
made possible by Newcomens engine resulted in considerable
expansion of mining infrastructure including the double track
system to carry coal more efciently. At the same time Darbys
process which substituted coal for charcoal in iron smelting
allowed the use of cast iron to replace brass and copper in
the manufacture of cylinders and boilers reducing the cost of
Newcomens engines. The decisive shortcoming of Newcomens
engine was that it only produced power on the downstroke which
seriously limited its use. This was remedied in 1775 when Watt
designed an enclosed cylinder in which steam could be admitted
not only to power the downward stroke but also the upward
stroke; a patent was granted to Watt in 1782.
Experiments using steam engines to power ships had begun in
1778 in France and a steamboat service linking Philadelphia to
Trenton in New Jersey along the Delaware river was established
by John Fitch in 1790. The use of steam to power vehicles on land
however, was a more serious challenge. The best any atmospheric
steam engine could do even with iron rails was to move along a
level trackway. Watt had already realised that high pressure
steam was the answer but was inhibited by the potential danger
of exploding boilers. It was left to Trevithick to bring together all
the improvements in valves, boiler construction, and cranks to
produce a working prototype steam powered road vehicle which
he demonstrated just outside his home town of Cambourne in
Cornwall, on Boxing Day 1801. The following year he was granted
a patent entitled, Steam engines improvements in the construction thereof and Application thereof for driving carriages
(Crump, 2007). Stephensons Rocket appeared in 1825 and was
operated on the Stockton to Darlington railway and a new age for
transport began which was to have a resounding impact on city
life as passengers could now travel further for the same time

commitment (or rather, physical energy expenditure (Kolbl

and
Helbing, 2003)).

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P. Rutter, J. Keirstead / Energy Policy 50 (2012) 7280

Although wind and water played an important role in the early

industrial age, for example by providing the means to mechanise
textile manufacture and move it from rural cottages to the
factories of the Lancashire and Derbyshire dales, these sources
had relatively little impact on the overall urban energy supply.
Water power in particular was only possible where there was a
reliable supply of owing water of sufcient volume to turn the
water wheels. Steam does not suffer from such constraints and
allowed factories to be located in large population centres with
access to navigable waterways or later on, to railways.

5. The rise of networked energy systems in urban Britain

The impact of the Industrial Revolution spread throughout
Europe, the New World and eventually more widely, with each
region developing its own route and pace towards what we now
recognise as a modern city. A comparative study of the rates of
penetration of energy technologies and the consequent changes
on society cannot be dealt with here; instead we will focus on the
development of complex networked energy systems in Britain as
an example of at least one route to the modern urban environment. In this case, the social and economic changes brought about
by the Industrial Revolution led to a need to restructure the
provision of urban energy services, specically via the use of
network infrastructures.
The 18th century saw an explosion in population and city
growth in Britain. With the exception of London, the cities of the
south and east that had enjoyed a dominant position due to trade
with the northern European states declined in importance and the
ports and cities of the industrial north and west increased in size
and wealth. In 1835, Manchester was described by Alexis de
Tocqueville, the French commentator as having a sort of black
smoke which covers the city. Under this half daylight, 300,000
human beings are ceaselessly at work. The homes of the poor are
scattered haphazardly around the factories. From this lthy sewer
pure gold ows. In Manchester civilised man is turned back
almost into a savage (Freese, 2006). England and Wales were
ahead of the rest of Europe in the pace of urbanisation. By 1860
about 50% of the population was urbanised compared to about
25% of the populations of the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy with
France at around 18% (Malanima and Volckart, 2007).
The industrialisation of the growing towns and cities was
greatly facilitated by improvements in methods of transport,
notably the railway network. The railways revolutionised land
transport and allowed fresh food, fuel and people to be brought
into the centre of cities on a daily basis at a relatively low cost.
Londons Euston station was opened in 1837. Mainline stations
operating from London were prohibited from the centre of the
city because Parliament was concerned about the disruption their
construction would cause to the city but even so, at least 100,000
Londoners had their homes destroyed. By 1850 in addition to
commuters brought into London by train, at least 15,000 people
travelled to work in London by paddle steamer along the Thames.
The centre of London became so congested in that Charles
Pearson, a City of London solicitor, set out plans in 1845 for an
underground railway to alleviate the problem. After a number of
false starts, in part due to reluctant investors, construction began
in 1860. Sadly Pearson died in 1862 a year before the rst
underground railway was opened between Farringdon and Paddington (Wolmar, 2004). This relied on steam engines for motive
power with chimneys to allow smoke and steam to escape from
the tunnels. These technological innovations naturally increased
the demand for transportation energy, but also had a signicant
impact on the energy demands of other sectors. Commuters were
able to move out of the crowded cities into suburban homes,

which were often larger requiring greater heating and lighting

demands and needed to be lled with new manufactured goods
(Kennedy, 2011).
The growth of urban populations also highlighted the health
hazards of urban living and Parliament responded by passing a
number of Town Improvement Acts during the 18th and early
19th centuries. These compelled towns to provide clean water
and to clean, pave and light the streets. Lighting in particular was
an important application that helped establish networked urban
energy services.
Better street lighting was needed to improve the safety of
people commuting in and out of the city and to effectively
lengthen the working day. Initially streets were lit by means of
parish lamps consisting of a small tin vessel half lled with sh
oil containing a piece of cotton twist as a wick (Ackroyd, 2000).
Lamplighters were employed to light, trim and ll the lamps. By
the end of the 17th century oil lamps were the dominant form of
street lighting but increasing demand for higher quality lighting
stimulated research into better forms of illumination and from
the 1770s, the Royal Society handed out many prizes and awards
for lighting improvements (Fouquet and Pearson, 2006). By the
early 19th century there were 35,000 lamps lighting the streets of
London utilising a lighting system that had changed little for
perhaps a thousand years. However, a new energy system was
about to appear that was particularly suited to the urban
environment.
At the end of the 18th century, William Murdoch in Britain and
Philip Lebon in France were independently experimenting with
the gases that were produced by heating coal or wood under
controlled conditions. In 1798 Murdoch used coal gas to light a
room in a house in Cornwall and in 1801 Lebon staged a
demonstration of gas lighting in Paris (Williams, 1981). Albrecht
Winzer, a German professor of commerce, was quick to realise
that this provided the potential for a new method of lighting and
began public demonstrations of gas lighting in London in 1804.
Increasing public interest encouraged Boulton and Watt, together
with Murdoch, to install six cast-iron retorts to provide the gas for
lighting a cotton mill in Manchester in 1806. In the same year,
Winzer who realised the commercial advantages of centrally
manufactured gas that could be piped to many customers
anglicised his name to Frederick Winsor and attempted to gain
a government charter allowing him to form a commercial gas
lighting company. His rst attempt failed but in 1812 he started
the Gas Light and Coke Company that would eventually control
most of the London gas market. Gas lighting received Royal
patronage in 1821 when the Prince Regent introduced gas for
lighting the music room and banqueting hall of his pavilion at
Brighton. By 1829 some two hundred gas companies had been
formed and gas lighting had been installed many of the larger
cities in Britain (Williams, 1981). However, there were some
setbacks to the edgling industry. An experiment with gas lighting in the newly built Houses of Parliament in 1838 was
abandoned since the cost was nearly four times that of traditional
wax candles (Barty-King, 1984). But in spite of early difculties by
1849, gas lighting provided by local gas works had been installed
in 700 large towns in the UK but both the growing domestic and
commercial markets for lighting were about to undergo further
change.
The domestic market was still largely dependent upon oil
lamps that burned expensive whale oil, tallow candles, or rushlights, which were smelly and gave a poor light. Technical
improvements to oil lamps improved their efciency and the cost
of oil lighting fell by two-thirds between 1750 and 1820. The
price of lighting continued to fall but by the middle of the 19th
century whales were becoming increasingly difcult to nd.
There was also an increasing demand for lubricants for the

P. Rutter, J. Keirstead / Energy Policy 50 (2012) 7280

growing number of industrial machines. There was a clear

opportunity for the development of a new source of light oil. In
1837, Baron Karl von Reichenbach and Abraham Gesner in 1847
showed that as well as gas, parafn and other oils and chemicals
could be extracted from organic solids such as coal, wood, tar and
shale. Natural oil and gas seeps had been known and used for
centuries so when the young chemist James Young was told about
an unusual underground spring near a coal mine in Alfreton in
Derbyshire that produced about 300 gallons a day of a thin treacly
liquid, he had the presence of mind to carry out an analysis and
discovered that it contained parafn, naptha, light oil and a
heavier lubricating oil. It also burned with a brilliant illuminating power. Following his discovery, he patented a process in
1850 describing how to extract coal oil and crack it into its
component substances (MSSO, 2012). A year later, James Parafn
Young opened what was probably the worlds rst oil renery at
Inchgate on the outskirts of Bathgate in central Scotland. These
innovations soon spread beyond the lighting sector, and paved
the way for oil-based transport of many modern cities.

6. The electric age

Lighting produced by either a gas or oil ame had improved
considerably since the days of candles and rushlights but suffered
from a number of disadvantages. It was a potential re hazard, the
ames produced soot, and light levels were low especially outside. Gas was expensive and slow to penetrate the domestic
market and by the end of the 19th century, it was to be
challenged by electricity. In contrast to gas, electric lighting
offered convenience and cleanliness, features which combined
with its versatility as a power source, enabled electricity to
become the major urban energy source of the twentieth century.
Inventors were quick to understand and utilise the connection
between magnetism and electricity demonstrated by Faraday in
1831. The rst electric motors appeared in 1837 and the electric
telegraph was commercialised in 1844. The rst practical electric
lighting system was demonstrated by Jablochkoff in Paris and
London in 1878. This consisted of an electric arc struck between
two carbon electrodes. 1878 also saw the rst oodlit football
match when Shefeld Football Association played the rst evening match under 8000 candle power provided by two Siemens
generators (IET, 2012). After a demonstration of the Jablochkoff
candle in a concert hall in New York, the New York Times of 10
November 1880 proclaimed that one candle can replace six gas
burners and yield ve times more light. However, in common
with other electrical devices of the time the lighting system
required its own generating system, in this case consisting of a
steam engine and two generators. Edison had already worked on
a number of electrical devices and had sufcient wealthy backers
and valuable patents to nance his extensive workshop and
laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey. He realised the advantages
of Winzers central gas production system and set about designing an equivalent electrical generating system, which provided
electricity to customers through copper wires (Patterson, 1999).
Edison also attempted to develop an electric light source that
could be used in enclosed spaces more easily than the electric arc.
Both he and the English physicist Swan arrived at a practical
solution to the problem independently in 1878 and by 1881
twelve hundred of Swans bulbs were used to light the Savoy
theatre in London. Edison in turn, exhibited his lighting system at
the Paris exhibition in 1881 and at Crystal Palace in London a year
later. It was the success of his electric bulb that enabled Edison
to commercialise his integrated power and lighting systems by
building power stations at Holborn in London and Pearl Street in
Manhattan. The Pearl Street station fed steam from coal-red

77

boilers to six generating sets each producing 1000 kW, enough to

light the one square mile of New York City. The British electricity
industry boomed between 1870 and the early 1880s with many
entrepreneurs entering the business and considerable investment
attracted by new companies formed to supply electrical equipment and power (Shiman, 1993).
The UK government both encouraged and hindered the development of the edgling gas and electricity industries. In 1860 the
Metropolis Gas Act allowed existing gas companies to have
monopolies in the districts where they operated and in 1882
the Electric Lighting Act gave similar monopolies to electricity
companies, only this time a so-called scrap-iron clause was
included. This allowed the companies to have the monopoly
supply for a specic district for 21 years after which the company
would be subjected to compulsory purchase at a value based on
its material assets. Hughes (1983) argues that, in the opinion of
private enterprise, the 1882 Act stied the development of the
British electricity supply companies. However Hannah (1979)
states that investors were deterred by exaggerated claims for
both arc lighting and incandescent lighting, pointing out that at
least one and a half million pounds had been subscribed by a
prematurely enthusiastic investing public, mostly on worthless
patent fees for often fraudulent inventions, legal expenses and
promoters prots. In spite of the frantic activity in the 1880s the
electricity boom soon turned to bust and Britain fell far behind
the USA in installing and using electric power for lighting and
other purposes. In 1890 there were 235,000 arc lights in use in the
US, and streets in virtually every American city were lit with
bright lights whereas in Britain there were only 700 arc lights on
the streets (Shiman, 1993).
The gas industry put up a spirited ght to retain its position in
the lighting market helped by the invention of the incandescent
mantle by Auer von Welsbach which tripled the efciency of gas
lighting and improved its quality (Fouquet and Pearson, 2003).
However, Winzers original patent had envisaged the use of gas
for both heating and cooking as well as lighting but it was not
1879 that in evidence to a House of Commons Committee,
Magnus Ohren of the Crystal Palace District Gas Company
testied new rms are embarked in this business and all sorts
of gas apparatus are now made by the thousand. These included
gas cookers, and gas boiling rings. Persistent fears (reminiscent of
coal) that cooking with gas might taint food and injure health
were refuted in The Lancet and London Hospital adopted gas
cooking for both patients and staff (Williams, 1981). The reluctance of British towns and cities to adopt electric lighting seemed
to be based primarily on cost and fears about the implications of
granting a monopoly to an electric company. One local authority
in London announced it was taking bids for electric lighting in
order to force gas prices down (Shiman, 1993) but in the US, there
seemed to be more public interest in getting bright electric
lighting for their urban centres than cost.
The next century saw both the gas industry and the electricity
industry diversify from their primary market of lighting. But rst
substantial rationalisation took place in both industries. This was
to have a considerable impact on the way the urban energy
supply system was both managed and congured. At the beginning of the 20th century there were over 800 gas businesses
supplying the UK market and by 1935 the gas supply industry
provided employment for about 230,000 people, supplied about a
quarter of the population, and had capital assets worth about
200 million (Williams, 1981: 68). By 1950 about 80% of British
dwellings were connected to a gas supply (Fawcett et al., 2000)
but the industry encountered strong competition from electricity
until its fortunes recovered with the discovery of natural gas in
the North Sea. Similarly, by 1920, the UK electricity system
consisted of over 600 suppliers owned both by local authorities

78

P. Rutter, J. Keirstead / Energy Policy 50 (2012) 7280

and private companies acting independently resulting in about

75% more generating plant throughout the country than was
required to supply peak demand. As an example of the extraordinary diversity that had grown in the industry, by 1918 in
London alone there were 70 authorities, 50 different types of
system, 10 different frequencies and 24 different supply voltages
(Butler, 2001).
These infrastructures were no longer t for purpose and in
1925 a government report produced by Lord Weir recommended
that electricity generation should be restricted to a limited
number of power stations connected to a national grid. This
resulted in the 1926 Electricity Supply Act and the formation of
the Central Electricity Board (CEB). By 1935 nearly 3000 miles of
primary transmission lines and 1200 miles of secondary lines had
been built. The grid nally reached all parts of the country by
1945. One of the functions of the post-war CEB, nationalised
under the Electricity Act of 1947, was to accelerate the use of
electricity in industry.
It took much longer to nationalise the gas industry. The Gas
Regulation Act of 1920 was the rst to allow the exchange of gas
from one undertaking to another but this was complicated by the
demand pattern for gas such that by 1938 only 0.4% of all gas sold
was via this type of exchange. However, the implied threat of
nationalisation accelerated the amalgamation of undertakings
into holding companies. The 19391945 War caused valve systems to be installed between adjacent undertakings in London,
Liverpool and Manchester so that supply could be continued and
sections of main isolated for repair. The UK gas industry was
nally nationalised in 1948. However, the story was not over.
Britain converted its gas supply from coal gas to natural gas
between 1967 and 1977 at a cost of 563 million, equivalent to
approximately 56 billion today. One of the consequences of the
conversion to natural gas was that the coal-red municipal gas
works, often located within urban centres, were no longer
required. Natural gas was largely drawn from the gas elds of
the North Sea and provided through a national gas grid, completed in 1978.
By the mid 1960s, the demand for electricity for both domestic
and industrial use was expanding at 7% per annum. Much larger
power stations were required which consumed millions of tons of
coal per annum (a 1 GW station burns about 3 million tons of coal

a year) and an enormous amount of cooling water that could only

be drawn from major rivers or the sea. The grid allowed these
stations to be built away from urban centres close to sources of
fuel and water (Patterson, 1999).
The natural gas and electricity grids marked a radical change
in the UK urban energy system. The only substantial import of
fuel that now needed to be transported by road or rail into the
urban centres was petrol or diesel, largely for transport. In a sense
this has taken the place of the oats required for the horses and the
coal for the power stations dedicated to providing electricity for
the trams and underground. The energy demands for the domestic, commercial and industrial sectors of urban communities are
now largely met by electricity and natural gas brought in through
the wires and pipes of national grids. This has the advantage of
physically removing many of the externalities of the energy
system from the city (e.g., pollutants from combustion in electricity generation). However this shift also changed the urbanness of these energy systems. Whereas before energy resources
were imported to each individual city from its hinterland or wider
markets on an ad-hoc basis, cities were now stitched together as
part of national energy systems.

7. The future of urban energy systems

The transitions described so far are summarised in Table 1 and
Fig. 1, and they share four common features. First, each of the fuel
transitions represent an intensication of energy use (Smil, 1994).
Early biomass systems enabled societies to access energy reserves
accumulated over hours, days or perhaps years in the form of
animal power, wind and water renewables, and woody biomass.
However fossil fuel energy systems take advantage of thousands
or millions of years of concentrated solar energy, thus enabling
the system to overcome the physical constraints of increasing
biomass consumption (i.e., larger collection areas, longer supply
chains). Each period also showed increases in per capita energy
use despite technological innovations, for example through more
efcient heating or lighting technologies. A good example of this
is the introduction of commuting in London, which increased
the demand for transport energy and also changed patterns of
domestic energy consumption.

Fig. 1. The rise in energy demand per capita as communities urbanized and then industrialised, switching from a biomass-fuelled energy system to fossil fuels around 400

years ago. Data from Smil (1994), Grubler

(2011), and Sorensen (2011).

P. Rutter, J. Keirstead / Energy Policy 50 (2012) 7280

The second trend is the increasing complexity of urban energy

systems. As Tainter (1988) notes, societies often solve their
problems through increased organisational and technological
complexity and this can be observed in the case of urban
energy systems as well. Early systems relied upon biomass
gathered from the local area, necessitating small supply lines
and crop management strategies. The transition to coal, particularly the differences between the English experience, with its sea
and canal transport, and that of continental Europe, illustrates the
need to expand the physical reach of the energy system into
the citys wider regional and national hinterland, requiring
increased organisation and coordinated supply chains. Modern
electricity and gas networks take this further still, knitting cities
together into a national energy system that, in the case of
electricity in particular, must be managed on a near-real
time basis.
Third, urban energy system transitions often benetted from
policies to promote innovation, motivated by a strategic view of
the overall system and the constraints of existing system congurations. The Royal Society lighting prizes, the Prussian competition for more efcient stoves, and the scrap iron clause all
demonstrate how governments and private-sector actors engaged
with the energy system to ensure that it would meet their
perceived long-term requirements while mitigating the downsides of current system congurations. These interventions were
not always positive as established stakeholders were often
reluctant or outright hostile, to shift to new technologies. Such
patterns are well described in the literature on technological
transitions (Geels, 2002; Verbong and Geels, 2007).
Finally, each transition of the core structure of the urban
energy system did not evolve in isolation but in parallel with
wider changes in society and technology. Examples of this include
increased transportation speeds and rail networks facilitating
urban growth, the development of steam engines for enhanced
coal extraction but also motive power for factories, the use of
whale oils for lubricants as well as lighting, and the role of
electricity in providing enhanced communication networks in
addition to more traditional energy services like heating and
lighting. These highlight the importance of studying urban energy
systems specically, as cities represent the centres of social and
economic change.
A nal observation, clearly visible in Fig. 1, is that these
transitions have been occurring with increasing rapidity. As
described above, 13th century London looked remarkably similar
to the earliest cities, but then the pace picked up: the transition to
coal had begun in earnest by the 18th century, the oil economy
beginning in the late 19th century, and the modern national grids
evolving since the Second World War. As noted by Bettencourt
et al. (2007), this pattern emerges because each system conguration eventually exhausts its available resources or the capacity
of its supporting infrastructure and, whether through the resulting price signals or political decisions and market interventions,
this scarcity facilitates the shift to a new technological system.
However to date, each new energy system has been more energy
intensive than the last (although drawing on a different fuel
source), creating additional new pressures and suggesting that
the overall pace of innovation must accelerate.
Given these observations on historical trends, what might we
conclude about the future of urban energy systems? As in past
systems, we can identify a number of constraints and drivers for
future change. In developed countries, such as the UK, current
challenges include the increasing scarcity of traditional fossil
fuels, aging energy infrastructures, and concerns about climate
change. Improved efciency in the urban energy system offers
one solution to this problem. Recent research on the optimised
design of urban energy systems suggests that signicant energy

79

and carbon emissions savings of approximately 20% are possible

with existing technology (Sugihara et al., 2004; Keirstead et al.,
2011; Weber and Shah, 2011). Smart grid technologies will allow
energy producers and consumers to be linked more closely,
allowing the maximum value to be extracted from existing assets
(for example, by carefully managing times of peak demand) and
improved energy efciency in the home also offers a way to
improve the nancial and environmental efciency of energy
service provision, provided that appropriate policy incentives
can be identied (see, for example, the recent debate over the
UKs Green Deal (Carrington, 2012)). However, entirely new
supply side technologies may also be needed. Just as in previous
transitions, where the difculties of biomass energy supply
eventually led to a shift to fossil fuels, the current cost and
environmental impacts of fossil fuels may lead to the increased
adoption of alternative technologies like renewable energy,
nuclear ssion, and in the long-term perhaps nuclear fusion.
To some extent, changing cost structures are already being seen
with the cost of solar photovoltaics, for example, having fallen
17% between 2009 and 2010 even when excluding government
support programmes (Barbose et al., 2011).
Arguably the key question is how these innovations might
affect the fabric of urban energy systems and the societies and
economies they support. On the one hand, the increased use of
nuclear power and large-scale renewable energy would t well
with the existing system of centralised supply, simply substituting for existing fossil fuel power sources and leaving cities in their
current roles as largely passive centres of demand. On the other
hand, innovations like smart grid technologies and combined heat
and power must be embedded directly within the urban fabric,
suggesting a return to the late 19th century model of local
utilities (i.e., the utility companies themselves may be national for
economies of scale, but operating with a greater awareness of
local energy geography). Energy service companies, which provide consumers with end services such as heating and lighting
rather than raw fuels, are a potentially signicant part of this shift
and are actively promoted by policy makers in Europe and
elsewhere (Bertoldi et al., 2006). Information and communication
technologies (ICT) might also offer opportunities for new modes
of service provision, such as integrated mobility services and
online access to goods and services, potentially reducing the
energy intensity of these activities but also changing the way
in which people move about the city in performing their daily
activities.
In contrast, the cities of developing nations are experiencing
many of the same drivers seen in 18th and 19th century Europe.
Specically, these countries are seeing rapidly urbanizing populations, which leads to the increased demand for energy services
that come with rising standards of living. Existing biomass-based
energy systems will struggle to cope with these demands, and
there will be a need to access new more efcient modern energy
services such as electricity and fossil fuels (Leach, 1992; Chancel,
2010; Nissing and Blottnitz, 2010). A recent report by the World
Energy Council (WEC, 2010) notes that many of the technologies
needed for such a shift are already known; the question is how to
ensure their adoption and successful use. This suggests that, in
addition to the lifestyle changes that one might expect to occur
with improved access to modern energy services, the institutional
and market changes necessary to introduce commercial energy
services and related infrastructure may have the greatest effect on
these cities in general, for example, by helping to bring residents
into the formal economy. For example, an electrication project in
Kibera, Kenya (a large informal settlement in Nairobi) found that
the installation of pre-paid metres helped to make connection
fees affordable for individual households and reduce reliance on
stolen electricity supplies (Mohammad, 2009).

80

P. Rutter, J. Keirstead / Energy Policy 50 (2012) 7280

Looking beyond these next transitions, at least two issues must

be considered when assessing the long-term futures of urban
energy systems. The rst is the warning of some systems analysts
that increased complexity and integration may create sustainability risks in the long run (Fisk and Kerherve, 2006). Managing
complexity requires resources and these ows can be difcult to
maintain over time (Tainter, 1988). The second related point is
whether or not energy systems innovation will continue to
happen quickly enough to support the needs of a larger, wealthier
global urban population in a climate-constrained environment.
Each of the transitions described here have led to higher per
capita rates of energy consumption, as improvements in efciency are outstripped by increases in levels of activity and
production. The question is therefore whether or not society can
keep up this frenetic pace.
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